Friday, December 4, 2009

Universal Healthcare And Death Panels – Sarah Palin Was Right

Sarah Palin was roundly criticized, laughed at, and excoriated by supporters of Obama when she said that the universal health care plan would lead to death panels. The characterization of the term ‘death panels’ was quickly associated with people wearing tin foil hats. It is ironic that a group of people who believe the twin towers were brought down by inside conspiracies and that a plane never crashed into the Pentagon, could call other people ‘tin foil hat wearers’.

When liberals are afraid of a person or of a particular point, they attack it with a vengeance. It’s much like the story ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ by Hans Christian Andersen. The Emperor is told that his clothes will be invisible only to the incompetent and the stupid. He doesn’t want to seem incompetent so, of course he says that he sees the clothes, as does everyone else until a child says “He hasn’t got any clothes on!”

The moment the term ‘Death Panels’ is labeled as a lunatic term; everyone is supposed to be afraid to explore the logic behind the term. It is a strategy often used by liberals. We see the proof that there are, in fact, ‘Death Panels’ but we are supposed to be afraid to say it for fear of being labeled incompetent or stupid – but if you see the emperor wearing a pair of stripped boxer shorts, it’s stupid to pretend that he’s wearing a three piece suit.

When this health care debate started, the first instinct was to look at other countries which have tried universal health care. What we saw was frightening – long waits for MRIs, horrific survival rates for cancer, waits for hip surgeries and on and on. It is so bad in England that there is a waiting list just to get on the waiting list! There are 40,000 people in the UK who have been waiting over a year for surgeries. There are shortages of critical supplies, drugs and medical equipment. According to the Burton Report, it is so bad in some countries that there is a black market in health care. In Japan life saving devices such as defibrillators are rarely available.

Socialized medicine has ruined the medical profession in any country where it has been tried. It’s basic economics. Increase the demand for a product and decrease the incentive to supply that demand and you create a shortage. Not only is there a shortage in medical care, there is little to zero medical innovation and advancement. There is no money to invest in research and no incentive to even try. There is a reason why most new medical innovations come out of the United States – it is called the free market.

People who support the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Health care plan say that their plan is different. They say their plan will give people a choice; that people will be able to keep their current plan and won’t be forced into anything they don’t want. Their own words, however, prove that this is not the case.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who is now an economics adviser for Barack Obama, said the following at a speech in 2007 at UC Berkeley. The premise of Reich’s comments is that this is what a presidential candidate would say if he were honest about healthcare:

"what I'm going to do is that I am going try to reorganize it (healthcare) to be more amenable to treating sick people but that means you, particularly you young people, particularly you young healthy people...you're going to have to pay more.""And by the way, we're going to have to, if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive...so we're going to let you die.""Also I'm going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government in terms of Medicare, Medicaid…to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. What that means, less innovation and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market which means you are probably not going to live much longer than your parents."

Tom Daschle was Barack Obama's first choice to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. In Dashchle’s 2008 book, ‘Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis’, he laid out some of his ideas on healthcare:"Doctors will have to 'learn to operate less like solo practitioners' and be willing to accept mandatory government controls and guidelines."Daschle advocates the creation a brand new bureaucracy called the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology. This new government organization will monitor all medical treatments to make sure that your doctor is prescribing the exact drugs and medical treatments that the federal government believes are 'appropriate' and 'cost effective'. This would slow the development and use of new medications and treatments because they are driving up medical costs. According to Betsy McCaughey, Daschle praises Europeans for being more willing to accept 'hopeless diagnoses' and 'forgo experimental treatments,' and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is a special advisor to the President on health care. He believes people between the age of 15 and 40 should be given preferential treatment. Some quotes from Emanuel:"Suppose a 25-year-old and a 65-year-old have a life threatening disease. Since the 25-year-old has many more potential years of life ahead of him, he should receive preferential treatment.""The complete lives system discriminates against older people…. Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years.""Health services should not be guaranteed to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia."

Barack Obama said:"So that's where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that's also a huge driver of cost, right? I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here…I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists…It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions through normal political channels. And that's part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance."

What is this independent group of Obama’s to be called? A death panel by any other name is still a death panel.

People may argue that the quotes listed above are taken out of context. An example of something truly taken out of context, ironically also involving Sarah Palin, is when Drew Griffin from CNN said to Palin, “some conservatives have been pretty hard on you… "The National Review" had a story saying that, you know, I can't tell if Sarah Palin is incompetent, stupid, unqualified, corrupt, or all of the above? In actuality, the National Review article by Byron York said "Watching press coverage of the Republican candidate for vice president, it's sometimes hard to decide whether Sarah Palin is incompetent, stupid, unqualified, corrupt, backward or, well, all of the above." The words “Watching press coverage” completely change the meaning. There is nothing, in any of the quotes listed above, that can change the context of the meaning or the intent of what is said in the way that those three words “Watching press coverage” do.

The Health care proposals that are being shoved down the throats of the American people do, in fact, have death panels. It would be obvious if all we had to go on were the many examples of how socialized healthcare works in different countries around the world. In fact, we have so much more proof than that as stated in the very words of the very people who are shoving this immoral debacle down our throats. Who the hell do these people think they are? If I work and save my own money I won’t have the right to use my OWN money on the care of my elderly parents? It won’t be available? This is their moral plan? This plan is pure evil and it is a moral obligation to stop it.